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In Kansas, Conservatives Vilify Fellow Republicans

Voters in Topeka listening to Joe Patton, a conservative challenging a moderate Republican state senator in Tuesday’s primary.Credit
Steve Hebert for The New York Times

TOPEKA, Kan. — In eight years in the Kansas Legislature, State Senator Dick Kelsey said, he never voted for a tax increase and frequently supported spending cuts. As an evangelical pastor, a staunch opponent of abortion and an acknowledged leader in the fight to elect conservative lawmakers, he has been endorsed by Kansans for Life and the National Rifle Association.

But after publicly criticizing elements of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax plan this year, Mr. Kelsey found himself among a cluster of conservative Republican state senators that a more conservative coalition here is working to defeat in Tuesday’s primary elections.

Kansas politics have been tilting more to the right for at least the last two decades. And now that shift is prompting a bitter clash within the state’s Republican Party. Conservatives are feverishly working to win the Senate and drive out the last remnants of what they see as moderate Republicanism in a state with a deep-rooted history of centrist Republicans in the mold of Bob Dole, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nancy Kassebaum.

The divisive primary campaign reflects the ambivalence gripping Republicans across the country, yet the situation here is more complicated than the typical conservative-versus-establishment disputes.

What sets the battle in Kansas apart is the distance between the factions. Conservative and moderate Republicans essentially operate as separate parties, and so far, no one — including Mr. Brownback — has stepped forward to try to bridge that gap in the popular tradition of moderation. Instead, each side claims to represent the soul of the party.

“We don’t even know what it means to be a Republican in the state of Kansas,” said Casey W. Moore, a conservative Senate candidate from the Topeka area.

Nationally, conservatives have been defining the party in their image. Last week, they scored a big victory in Texas when a Tea Party favorite defeated Gov. Rick Perry’s favored candidate in the primary for an open United States Senate seat. That outcome followed conservative victories this year over established Republicans in Senate primary races in Indiana and Nebraska.

Kansas conservatives are optimistic that they can do the same on the state level and upend long-held assumptions that the people of their state prefer moderate lawmakers.

Two years ago, conservative Republicans here captured a majority in the Kansas House of Representatives — around 70 of 125 seats — for the first time in about four decades, and, for the first time in at least half a century, Kansans elected a conservative governor, Mr. Brownback. Conservatives need to pick up three or four seats to win control of the 40-member Senate, where 14 moderate Republicans and 8 Democrats often vote together to maintain a coalition that gives them a majority.

The move toward a more conservative Kansas began about 25 years ago, when a small group of fiscally conservative legislators, feeling marginalized by the Republican leadership, began promoting an agenda that emphasized free markets, tax cuts and reducing government spending. They teamed with grass-roots social conservatives and, in 1994, gained a significant number of seats in the Kansas House and ousted its moderate speaker.

Conservatives continued to gain seats in the Legislature, and the rest of the country began to take notice of their brand of politics. “What’s The Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, which was made into a film, documented that rise.

Now that conservatives are closer than ever to full control of the state’s government, fighting between the two factions of the Republican Party has become more overt, and nastier.

“The conservatives, they hate the moderate Republicans,” said Burdett A. Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. “They think they really have conspired with Democrats and have prevented conservative forces from their rightful place of dominating the government.”

Mr. Brownback is openly challenging the moderate members of his party. Interest groups like the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking moderates and rallying support for conservatives.

Moderates have gotten a lift from Bill Graves, the former two-term Republican governor who has held fund-raisers for the candidates he supports. Mr. Graves, who was in office from 1995 to 2003, is familiar with intraparty scuffling: the conservative state party chairman resigned to challenge him in 1998, when he successfully ran for re-election. Moderate candidates have also benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from labor and teachers’ unions.

Photo

Yard signs for state candidates at a Republican forum in Topeka. Conservatives say some party members are too moderate.Credit
Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Conservatives accuse moderates of being Republicans in name only, while moderates say their conservative counterparts lack pragmatism. Both factions agree on one point, however: the gravity of this year’s elections.

The primaries are “critical to the future direction of state politics,” said H. Edward Flentje, a professor of politics at Wichita State University who has worked for moderate Republicans. He added that moderates believed that conservatives had “essentially been captured by interest groups that want to push Kansas to the extreme.”

Gary Mason, a Wichita businessman challenging a moderate incumbent, State Senator Carolyn McGinn, said that if conservatives prevailed, lawmakers “could have a very productive dialogue to move our state forward, instead of the time and energy we waste bickering over issues.”

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Moderate Republicans align more closely with Democrats, conservatives say. They criticized moderates for actions like passing a 1 percent sales tax increase two years ago, for their opposition to tougher voter identification laws and for their failure to repeal in-state tuition rights for illegal immigrants.

“They’ve adopted policies of excessive spending and increasing taxes that have killed jobs,” said Joe Patton, a conservative House member who is challenging a moderate senator, Vicki Schmidt, in Topeka.

Conservatives have attacked some moderates for opposing an amendment that would allow Kansas to opt out of the Affordable Health Care Act, President Obama’s health care overhaul law. A flier mailed out by the Kansas Chamber of Commerce called Pete Brungardt, a moderate senator from central Kansas, “Obama’s best friend in the Kansas Senate.”

Moderates said conservatives were too preoccupied with ideology and purity tests, which they called an all-or-nothing approach — even when it is impractical. This year, for instance, conservatives pushed through the largest tax cut in Kansas history, one that is expected to shave state revenue by more than a billion dollars over two years, at a time the state can ill afford to lose money, moderates say.

During a recent political forum here, candidates took turns flexing their conservative muscles. They described themselves as advocates for business and increased state sovereignty, and as opponents of abortion and Shariah law.

One candidate for the State Senate, Matthew Windheuser, was asked where he stood on social issues. “My first gun was an AK-47,” he responded, drawing approving laughter from an audience that included a man whose T-shirt read “Real Patriots Join Rightwingamerica.com.”

Moderates say they, too, favor minimal government spending, but not at the expense of vital social services and education.

“I have consistently advocated for budget cuts over the last three years, but my Republican conservative colleagues can’t get enough,” said John Vratil, a moderate senator who is retiring this year, in part, he said, because of the divisiveness in the Legislature.

Mr. Kelsey said that just a few years ago, conservative colleagues loved his blunt style of challenging Mark Parkinson, a Democrat who was the governor at the time.

Mr. Kelsey still challenges authority, but now that Mr. Brownback is in power, things have gotten trickier. The conservative coalition is campaigning against him, in part, he said, because he resisted portions of the Brownback tax cut plan.

While the plan, which Mr. Kelsey ultimately voted for, focused on slashing income taxes, Mr. Kelsey said he had advocated for a plan that centered on eliminating sales tax exemptions. He said he believed the enmity against him was also personal, a result of comments he made in which he said that a member of Mr. Brownback’s administration was unqualified.

Mr. Kelsey said that if he won the primary on Tuesday, he would continue to vote as a conservative and to speak his mind.

“It’s not going to be healthy for our party,” he said, “if we force people to lose any element of independence because they’re afraid if they cross two or three people, they want you gone.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 6, 2012, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: In Kansas, Conservatives Vilify Fellow Republicans. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe